“But too often, fantasy worlds are created like Ikea furniture, popping up whole with minimal assembly from big pre-existing parts that creak and come apart after heavy use. That’s why so many many fictional worlds seem to produce carbon copies of real world Western gender hierarchies, even if it becomes painfully dissonant with other details of the setting.”

Her article is about Microscope specifically, but I think it highlights that role-playing games in general have vast potential to help us look at the world with fresh eyes. A long, long time ago, role-playing games were panned as escapist fantasy. I think we’re realizing now they can also be the exact opposite.

me: “Actually no. Players pick where in time they want to explore but the characters in the game can’t move through time. Except, uh, forwards. At the normal speed.”

would-be players: “But… I can haz time travel?”

Fast forward to now. Microscope Echo is ready for playtesting. Yep, you can haz time travel.

As previously described, the game uses time travel, but play is really about exploring alternate histories. Seeing how the world would turn out differently if you went back and changed something. And now it’s time for playtesting!

Same drill as before: because Echo is a Microscope spin-off, you have to already know how to play Microscope to participate. I’m looking for people who will actually play the game and give feedback, not just read it. If you’re interested, email echo-playtest + lamemage.com or leave a comment here with your address in the email field. Make sure to include the last few role-playing games you’ve played (other than Microscope) so I know what kind of spread of players we’ve got.

The Earth was lost. The tide of Communism had spread to every corner of the globe.

But on the Moon the last patriots remained steadfast, raining down showers of city-crushing debris from their lunar bunkers. Vengeful, destructive, but ultimately futile. It was a last hurrah for the West, but too late to turn the tide.

On the moon the star-spangled banner still waved, but where the fifty stars once shined there was now only a single white disk…

Echo is the last of the Microscope spin-offs that’s going to appear in the Microscope Explorer book. I’ve been calling it a game of time travel but it’s really more accurate to say it’s a game of alternative history. The fun is changing key moments in your history and seeing how the repercussions — the echoes — make it turn out differently.

It’s a tricky business. It took a while to get the rules for Echo to a point where I was willing to playtest them, so I am happy to report that it is not only playable, it is fun. I had serious doubts. The whole process of taking a Microscope history and then continuously revising it was starting to look like it was an interesting idea but just too hard to manage as a game. But the current version seems to actually tackle it. Whew.

It was particularly interesting to see the same Periods morph back and forth. The Cold War space race became a military conflict — astronaut versus cosmonaut — then a great victory for the West, but then flipped and became a bitter defeat, leaving that last holdout of Americans on the Moon. Which also changed things so the alien relics buried beneath the lunar soil weren’t discovered until much, much later…

Rulers swore oaths on it (and broke them). Friends spirited it away and swore more oaths on it (and broke them). Later it was the wedding ring binding two houses in marriage (guess how that turned out?).

[ don’t be alarmed, the first thirty seconds or so is black, but if you have trouble here’s a direct link ]

That’s me, J.C. and Natalie playing, plus Ashley and Ed at the interview table. The background action is all the awesome folks of Story Games Seattle playing at the equally awesome Phoenix Comics & Games, as we do. Thanks to Alex, Candace and Glaser for deciding story games would make a fun topic for their film.

Oh and what’s that super-intense game we’re playing? That would be Downfall.

what I'm working on

I'm crunching away on Microscope Explorer, a supplement to make your Microscope games even better.

Two of the three spawn games (Union and Chronicle) have already gone to playtesting.

my games

Create a community together. Fight to make it be what you want. Then see if it burns to the ground.

Meanwhile, gamers around the world continue to do brave and wonderful things with Microscope. Create entire worlds then destroy them, all in an afternoon. It's a fractal role-playing game. Check it out.